In conventional drive arrays, drive firmware updates are carried out without monitoring input/output (I/O) activity on the drives. In such systems, a customer (or end user) can initiate a drive update of the firmware at any point using a management application. With such an implementation, there is a risk that the firmware updates lead to data corruption or I/O timeouts if there is heavy I/O traffic on the drives during such firmware updates.
It would be desirable to implement a method and/or apparatus for performing firmware updates to a number of drives in an array with minimum interruptions to drive input/output (I/O) operations.